In the wake of Alabama’s recent execution with nitrogen gas of Kenneth Smith, some American Catholics have been asking anew if Catholic teaching ever allows for the death penalty. The Church’s teaching on this question is not the same as it once was, and this can sometimes cause confusion and consternation. How can the Church’s teaching change? If it is different today than it was yesterday, how can I trust that it will not turn into something else tomorrow? Many modern Catholics think of the Church’s teaching as a monolithic enterprise, but the way in which Catholic teaching develops has always been multivalent and often includes a lot of twists and turns.
In Unitatis redintigratio, the Second Vatican Council’s decree on ecumenism, the term “hierarchy of truths” was introduced to describe the fact that not all of the Church’s teaching carries the same weight (11). The term was new, but the concept was not. St. John Henry Newman described the changing of teaching over time as the “development of doctrine.” It is ridiculous on its face to say that the Church’s teaching has never changed. Some teaching was settled very early—the resurrection of Jesus, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist—but other teaching took a while to crystallize—the relationship between the two natures of Christ, the divinity of the Holy Spirit, the canon of Scripture. After a great deal of argument and false starts these teachings too effectively became so well defined as to be irreformable, but they did not simply appear in a user’s manual handed down by God. The truth of these teachings had to be discerned by the Church. That discernment is not always pleasant, but the basis for it has always been trying to deepen our understanding of God’s Word found in Holy Scripture and Tradition. In other words, the process of doctrine developing is not an exercise in creativity but an attempt at excavation. The Holy Spirit, who is the author by way of inspiration of the Scriptures, is also at work in the Church’s magisterium, guiding the Church over time towards greater understanding of the truth.
Newman calls these changes development because he wants us to understand them as holding a certain consistency. A human baby has everything she needs within herself to be herself on the day of her conception. She has the same DNA and chromosomes at age 40 as she did in the womb. She is the same person. Yet she is also different. She has grown into a richer, fuller version of herself. But she is still herself. If she was human at conception but at age 40 she had become a polar bear or an octopus, somewhere along the line something went horribly awry.
One of the challenges for everyday Catholics in figuring all this out is that there is no official breakdown of the hierarchy of truths, nor any way of telling if a doctrine is developing rather than corrupting except through observation over time. Cardinal Avery Dulles, who was arguably the best theologian who wrote in English on this subject in the last half century, classified doctrines with a three prong system: teachings that have been revealed by God (doctrine of faith), teachings that are directly connected to God’s revelation, and teachings that are “authoritative” but not yet fully settled and therefore open to correction. The means of telling where a doctrine lies in this schema is how long and consistently it has been taught, by whose authority it has been given, and what words were used in articulating it. A teaching given by an ecumenical council or by multiple popes in encyclicals with language like “we solemnly declare” is a lot more authoritative than a statement on current economic policy made by a bishops’ conference, or even a statement made offhand in a press conference by a pope or a Vatican official.
Dulles says development can happen at all three levels, but that doctrines in those top two tiers are “irreversible or infallible” so they only develop slowly in one direction, towards greater clarity but never “contradiction.” In the third category though, change is still possible. The Church is still discerning, learning, and hopefully growing. Changes at this level may seem very different, but ultimately they are aimed at greater faithfulness to God’s Word. The changes to these doctrines happen in what Newman calls the “breathing together of the faithful and the pastors.” The magisterium alone teaches, but the laity must apply that teaching to their lives by means of an appeal to the conscience. Over time, this includes a good deal of conversation, trial and error, and even debate as the Church seeks to be faithful. As long as that is happening in a way that remains humble and respectful, Dulles says, “That kind of dissent, if it should even be called dissent, is quite understandable and even proper for Catholics.” In his book Magisterium, he characterizes this as “private dissent,” in which theologians or others might make their reservations known to trusted friends and colleagues in an effort to find clarity, as opposed to “public dissent” in which theologians, priests, or even individual bishops wage war on the magisterium in the media and set themselves up as an alternative authority.
Where does the death penalty fit into all this? The Church once supported the death penalty, but long before the current teaching came to be, the scope of this teaching had already narrowed considerably. “Heretics deserve not only to be separated from the Church by excommunication, but also to be severed from the world by death,” wrote St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica. He believed he was being quite liberal and lenient compared to his predecessors because he suggested the death penalty only be administered to a heretic after his second offense. Today, it would be difficult to find among even the most strident proponents of the death penalty someone who would advocate the execution of heretics, regardless of how many times they have offended.
In 1992, the first version of the current Catechism called for governments to limit themselves to “non-lethal” forms of punishment “because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.” Pope St. John Paul II followed up on this in his encyclical, Evangelium vitae, by connecting capital punishment to the whole array of life issues on which the Church teaches. He said that in the modern world cases in which the execution of an offender for the sake of protecting society “are very rare, if not practically non-existent” (56). John Paul also personally campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty around the world throughout his pontificate, calling it in an address in St. Louis in 1999, “both cruel and unnecessary.” Pope Benedict XVI followed suit in calling repeatedly for an end to capital punishment around the world.
All of this forms the backdrop to the 2018 amendment of section 2267 of the Catechism to say “the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” In Fratelli tutti, Pope Francis re-states this with vehemence, and adds for context references to early Church figures including St. Augustine who brought at least some aspects of the death penalty into question (263-265). He says that “all Christians and people of good will are today called to work for the abolition of the death penalty, legal or illegal, in all its forms,” and that “The firm rejection of the death penalty shows to what extent it is possible to recognize the inalienable dignity of every human being and to accept that he or she has a place in this universe” (268-269).
This teaching is clearly authoritative, being given by the pope in a high level document, with many references to what has come before, grounding all of it in the wider development of the Church’s understanding of the dignity of the human person. The death penalty, in all its forms, is an affront to human dignity. That is the teaching of the Church. To say that does not bring into question the many generations of faithful Catholics who thought otherwise. St. Thomas Aquinas was wrong about the necessity of executing heretics, but that does not invalidate the whole of his teaching. Like all of us, he worked from the light he had. The question is not whether the Church of today agrees with the Church of yesterday on a controversial topic. The question is what a figure like Aquinas might say now in light of the current teaching. That question is impossible to answer, since it would require his being formed in a very different world than the one he actually lived in. But one thing to my mind is certain, that even if Aquinas had some ongoing difficulty with the new teaching, he would recognize it as the Church’s teaching and he would approach dissent in a respectful way. He would not call the pope a heretic or garner an army of social media followers to validate himself.
Is it possible to be a good and faithful Catholic while disagreeing with the Church’s teaching on the death penalty? Certainly. Again, we can only work from the light we have. We all have a duty to obey our consciences, and a dissent offered in private in the manner that Dulles describes may in fact help the Church in the long run to articulate her teaching more clearly and faithfully.
The better question though is this: Given the long trajectory that has led to what the Church teaches today on this topic, is it at all likely that we will see the Church’s position reversed? That, it seems to me, is extremely doubtful. First of all, reversed to what? To the position held by John Paul II? To that of the early twentieth century? To that of Aquinas? Or Augustine? There is nowhere to retreat to on this question where the ground is not already shifting.
As I have argued elsewhere, the Church’s teaching on the dignity of the human person is the key that unlocks all of her moral teaching. The rich depth which that doctrine has been given in the last century of Catholic thought is truly beautiful and one of the greatest contributions the Church has ever made to human society. This teaching allows us to stand against the horrors of abortion, euthanasia, and modern warfare, but it also gives us an unprecedented insight into what it means to be human and to know and experience love. It springs from the very heart of the faith, from the audacious notion that God Himself took on human flesh and became one of us. The challenge for a Catholic who wants to advocate for capital punishment is how to see something like what we saw in Alabama—several minutes of excruciating pain followed by asphyxiation and death—as compatible with this notion of human dignity. It is a circle that cannot be squared.